Getting in our Hair

Welcome back, one and all, and happy 2013. Let me first of all thank all the parents who were so generous to me at Christmas time. I was overwhelmed with your kindness. I now have a new Kindle Paperwhite at home and I’m working on a new camera to replace the one that so sadly disappeared.

Today was a great day. We began by sharing our holiday experiences. Some of them were kind of funny! We then worked in our journals. Our topic today, which connects to the story we’ll be reading later this week in Treasures, was “someone you admire.” Most of the students wrote about their parents, a tribute to what good families we have in room 19. One student nominated God, and it’s hard to argue with that one!

We worked went over our phonics and spelling for the week. We introduced the key vocabulary words and read a short story to help learn the words in context. We started on our second unit in the 6+1 Traits of Writing program. We will be concentrating on organization in the next few weeks. The students took the standard scoring guide or “rubric” and translated it, with a little help from the teacher, from “educationese” to plain English. They have the opportunity to create a poster for this. While optional, any student who does a reasonably good job with this will get a homework pass. This will be due on Friday.

After recess, we started our exploration of electricity by working with static electricity. The students rubbed balloons on their hair or their sweaters to generate negative charges in the balloon. They then observed that the two negatively charged balloons repelled each other just like the like poles of a magnet would. They also observed that their now positively charged hair stood up and they liked that even better!

We’re starting our unit in fractions this week. If you would like more resources to help the students with this, there is a pretty good app available from the author’s of the textbook. It’s free.

Homework:  (1) Write spelling words 1-5 only five times each in cursive. Write a sentence for each of these words. (2) Do “Compounds,” page 180 and “Vocabulary” page 181 in the Practice book. (3) Do the “Making Static” study questions. (4) Do the “Factors 1” worksheet. (5) Do “Regions and Sets” pages 225-226 in the math book and “Look-Alikes” on the back of the answer sheet.